One of my very dear friends recently travelled to Portugal for the wedding of her manager. It was an unusual wedding in that, the newlywed couple are both American, but the bride has lived and worked in Ireland for the past number of years but is now planning to relocate back to America after the wedding. Everybody had to travel to the wedding, from Ireland and the US and there was 37 of them together for a full week.
One of the most touching parts of the whole ceremony was that the bride made personalised wedding favours for all of the guests. Not any normal wedding favour, each guest had a Corona bottle waiting for them when they sat down for dinner, inside of which was a scroll with a personalised letter written to each and every one of them. I read my friends letter, and it brought a tear to my eye – not only was this a gorgeous gesture for all of the guests, for the Irish in the crowd, it was a goodbye note too.
I am always hammering on about making your day special and that its the unusual little touches that will stand out in peoples memory. I am sure that anyone who attended that wedding will cherish that letter forever.
Maybe not practical for a large Irish extravaganza but for a smaller, more intimate wedding I think it would be a beautiful thing to do. The bride typed up each letter on sandy coloured paper (for a homemade alternative, you could dye white paper with a wet teabag) and burned around the edges so it had an old-map effect. She then rolled up each scroll and placed inside the Corona bottle which had a sand & shells in the bottom of the bottle to weight it.
